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Ginger Thompson

Senior Reporter

Ginger Thompson is a senior reporter at ProPublica. A Pulitzer Prize winner, she previously spent 15 years at The New York Times, including time as a Washington correspondent and as an investigative reporter whose stories revealed Washington’s secret role in Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers.

Thompson served as the Mexico City Bureau Chief for both The Times and The Baltimore Sun. While at The Times, she covered Mexico’s transformation from a one-party state to a fledgling multi-party democracy and parachuted into breaking news events across the region, including Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela.

For her work in the region, she was a finalist for The Pulitzer’s Gold Medal for Public Service. She won the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, an InterAmerican Press Association Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award. Thompson was also part of a team of national reporters at The Times that was awarded a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for the series “How Race is Lived in America.”

Thompson graduated from Purdue University, where she was managing editor of the campus newspaper, The Exponent. She earned a Master of Public Policy from George Washington University, with a focus on human rights law.

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate cited ProPublica’s reporting into the DEA’s role in two operations in Mexico that resulted in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of deaths.

The agency knew why the victims were kidnapped in 2010 by the Zetas drug cartel from a Holiday Inn in Mexico, but it did nothing to investigate or help. The victims’ friends and relatives now wonder why.

Lawmakers cite a ProPublica investigation and an inspector general report that detail how teams of foreign police officers trained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were linked to innocent lives lost in Mexico and Honduras.

A federal judge in Washington throws out conviction and says the DEA relied on a known “fabricator” to make its case that an Afghan man was a narco-terrorist.

Five criminals in far-flung parts of the world, five D.E.A. sting operations, five dubious links between drugs and terror. The characters are different but the story remains the same. Authorities said each case demonstrated alliances between terrorists and drug traffickers, but most of the alleged links fell apart in court. Here’s how narco-terrorism cases are made.

The DEA says it has proof. But in court, most of it is staged by its own informants.

Over eggs at a San Antonio café, a reporter listens as former law enforcement officials and one ex-drug cartel operative swap theories about El Chapo’s latest escape and what it says about the U.S. and Mexico.

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